Eric Cantor is gone, and if they're not careful, John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy could be next.

The earth-shattering upset in Virginia's 7th District Tuesday night means that Cantor, the House majority leader who has long been considered the heir-apparent to Boehner as speaker, won't be back in the next Congress.

And his loss is a significant victory for a growing group of frustrated House Republicans who have been plotting to shake up the GOP leadership structure ahead of the 114th Congress. Those plans have centered on ejecting Boehner from the speakership and then hoping for a consensus candidate to emerge who could either challenge Cantor for the top job, or at least slide in behind him as majority leader.

But Tuesday night's shocker turns those plans upside down. Cantor's loss not only means there will be a vacant spot in leadership, it also invites more dramatic action from that clutch of conservatives who have grown increasingly disenchanted with a leadership team that they view as out of touch—demographically, ideologically, and strategically—with the membership of the House Republican Conference.

Those conservatives, suddenly smelling blood in the water, might now be emboldened to push for a wholesale change in leadership—ousting Boehner and McCarthy in this November's conference elections, and entering the next Congress with a new top three.

"It should frighten everyone in leadership," one conservative House Republican, who exchanged text messages on condition of anonymity, said shortly after Cantor's defeat was official. "They haven't been conservative enough. We've told them that for 3 years. They wouldn't listen."

The GOP lawmaker added: "Maybe they will listen now."

Indeed, if Cantor's defeat offers a silver lining for Boehner and McCarthy, it's that they now have a five-month audition to convince those conservative members that they won't be ignored any longer. Boehner's fate may already be sealed, as earlier this year National Journal reported that between 40 and 50 members have verbally committed to electing a new speaker. But McCarthy, who is perhaps the most personally popular member of the leadership team, may have an outside shot of retaining his job as majority whip. (He may not want it now that Cantor, his best friend in Congress, has been fired.)

Asked whether Cantor's defeat means he and his fellow conservatives will attempt to clean house and bring in an entirely new leadership team, the House Republican answered: "Not necessarily. The policies are what count. Not the people."

It's a nice sentiment, but Washington is driven by relationships, and the group of young conservatives whose energy has dictated the mood within the House GOP since 2010 is likely to determine who holds the key leadership posts in 2015. The most ubiquitous name is that of Jeb Hensarling, the Texan and Financial Services chairman who conservatives have spent the past several months trying to convince to challenge either Boehner or Cantor. Hensarling has denied interest in doing so, but Cantor's loss will only energize the recruitment efforts.

Another lawmaker worth watching is Representative Tom Price, who is set to succeed Representative Paul Ryan as chairman of the Budget Committee. Price's allies have long argued that the ambitious lawmaker will be satisfied with his chairmanship next year and won't throw away that opportunity to run for a leadership post; that thinking could change very quickly in the weeks ahead.

And, of course, there's Ryan himself, who has long denied interest in the speakership—likely to avoid conflict with his friend Cantor—but who now enjoys a wide-open path to the speaker's office.

Still, there's no question that policy is important, and, indeed, the policies coming from the majority leader's office have been increasingly problematic for some conservatives. Cantor has been emphatic in conversations with colleagues that he wants to pass serious immigration reform, especially something that helps young illegal immigrants who were brought here by their parents— or, as Cantor calls them, "the kids." This image of Cantor as soft on immigration has hardened in recent months, prompting David Brat, his primary challenger, to attack the majority leader for supporting "amnesty."

"They haven't been conservative enough. We've told them that for 3 years. They wouldn't listen."

If the immigration talk wasn't enough to rankle some of the conference's most conservative members, Cantor made more enemies by muscling a flood-insurance bill through the House earlier this year, over the objections of many Republicans, including Hensarling, whose Financial Services Committee has jurisdiction over the matter. (Some members saw Cantor's actions as deliberately intended to weaken Hensarling, who has emerged as the consensus choice of conservatives looking to vault one of their own into the uppermost echelons of leadership.)

Perhaps most egregiously, Cantor infuriated a sizable bloc of House Republicans in March by approving a maneuver that allowed a controversial Medicare-reimbursement bill to pass the House without a recorded roll-call vote. As members seethed over the alleged trickery, Cantor's office dismissed the visceral backlash, angering some members who were longtime supporters of the majority leader. Before that, the only rumblings of a leadership shakeup involved Boehner; soon after, however, members began suggesting that Cantor was no longer a shoo-in to succeed him as speaker.

"I'm getting used to being deceived by the Obama administration, but when my own leadership does it, it's just not acceptable," Representative Matt Salmon of Arizona said after the episode.

Another House Republican who is friendly with Cantor put it more bluntly: "If there's another vote like [that], Eric won't be speaker. Ever."

Still, Cantor hasn't exactly been a foil to tea-party Republicans in the House; to the contrary, some feel the majority leader is their strongest ally on the leadership team, and have endorsed his ascension to the speakership. Cantor has spent years carefully building relationships and delivering favors for members of his conference, knowing he would need their support if he were to become speaker.

But even the conservative members who like Cantor personally are celebrating tonight—not because he was their top target but because the majority leader embodies a leadership team they view as weak, reactive, risk-averse, and ideologically diluted.

After the House Republicans' first term in the majority was ruined by open internecine warfare, a dozen conservative malcontents tried—and failed—to oust Boehner at the dawn of this 113th Congress. The speaker responded by spending considerable time and energy last year restoring relations with the right wing of his conference, and as a result, 2013 was relatively harmonious for the House GOP. (Boehner even won a standing ovation when announcing the House GOP's surrender 16 days into the government shutdown.)

But the disillusionment was quickly rekindled in this second session. A large faction of House Republicans came into 2014 determined to produce a proactive agenda, and pleaded with leadership to address four areas in particular—health care, taxes, privacy, and welfare spending—so as to strike a sharp election-year contrast against Democrats. Boehner's team rejected that approach, opting instead to play it safe and avoid missteps that could cost Republicans a chance to win the Senate.

"There are no big ideas coming out of the conference. Our leadership expects to coast through this election by banking on everyone's hatred for Obamacare," one Republican lawmaker who has been organizing the anti-Boehner rebellion said earlier this year. "There's nothing big being done. We're reshuffling chairs on the Titanic."

The approach taken by Boehner and Cantor may yet help Senate Republicans take back the majority. Ironically, it also might have ensured that they won't be around to work across the Capitol with them.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.